The increased popularity of on-line services such as AMERICA ONLINE.TM., COMPUSERVE.RTM., and other services such as Internet gateways have spurred applications to provide multimedia, including video and voice clips, to online users. An example of an online voice clip application is VOICE E-MAIL FOR WINCIM and VOICE E-MAIL FOR AMERICA ONLINE.TM., available from Bonzi Software, as described in "Simple Utilities Send Voice E-Mail Online", MULTIMEDIA WORLD, VOL. 2, NO. 9, Aug. 1995, p. 52. Using such Voice E-Mail software, a user may create an audio message to be sent to a predetermined E-mail address specified by the user.
Generally, devices interfacing to the Internet and other online services may communicate with each other upon establishing respective device addresses. One type of device address is the Internet Protocol (IP) address, which acts as a pointer to the device associated with the IP address. A typical device may have a Serial Line Internet Protocol or Point-to-Point Protocol (SLIP/PPP) account with a permanent IP address for receiving E-mail, voicemail, and the like over the Internet. E-mail and voicemail is generally intended to convey text, audio, etc., with any routing information such as an IP address and routing headers generally being considered an artifact of the communication, or even gibberish to the recipient.
Devices such as a host computer or server of a company may include multiple modems for connection of users to the Internet, with a temporary IP address allocated to each user. For example, the host computer may have a general IP address "XXX.XXX.XXX," and each user may be allocated a successive IP address of XXX.XXX.XXX.10, XXX.XXX.XXX.11, XXX.XXX.XXX.12, etc. Such temporary IP addresses may be reassigned or recycled to the users, for example, as each user is successively connected to an outside party. For example, a host computer of a company may support a maximum of 254 IP addresses which are pooled and shared between devices connected to the host computer.
Permanent IP addresses of users and devices accessing the Internet readily support point-to-point communications of voice and video signals over the Internet. For example, real-time video teleconferencing has been implemented using dedicated IP addresses and mechanisms known as reflectors. Due to the dynamic nature of temporary IP addresses of some devices accessing the Internet, point-to-point communications in real-time of voice and video have been generally difficult to attain.
The ability to locate users having temporary or dynamically assigned Internet Protocol address has been difficult without the user manually initiating the communication. Accordingly, spontaneous, real-time communications with such users over computer networks have been impractical. Further, it is desirable to have a communication utility which contains familiar features and functions to current communication utility such as telephones and cellular telephones. It is even further desirable to utilize the current graphic user interface technology associated with computer software in a manner to achieve a more flexible interface to a such a communication utility, without the limitations associated with hardware.
Accordingly, a need exists for a way to determine whether computer users are actively connected to a computer network.
A further need exists for a way to obtain the dynamically assigned Internet Protocol address of a user having on-line status with respect to a computer network, particularly the Internet.
An even further need exists for a method and apparatus by which to establish real-time, point-to-point communications over a computer network using a communication utility having an interface which combines the familiar aspects of current hardware communication utilities but which allows for the flexibility associated with graphic user interfaces.